


YK500: Talia

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2019 [27]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Blood, Cameos, Character Death, Drama, Escape, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Original Character Death(s), Strong Language, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 09:48:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20256133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: MODEL: YK500SERIAL NUMBER: #330 706 222DATE OF “ADOPTION”: April 12th 2038





	YK500: Talia

“We can’t keep her_._”  
  
“Well, obviously.”  
  
A wound opened in Talia’s heart, small but painful.  
  
She stayed perfectly still as she crouched near the door, ear to the floor and audio components dialed up as loudly as they could go. It was enough that she could hear her parents down the hall, around the corner and down to the bottom of the stairs. For some reason, this was their preferred place to argue.  
  
“Well, what are we supposed to do with her? I don’t want to go near her!”  
  
The wound widened.  
  
Still, Talia did not make a sound.  
  
“The authorities are going to be coming around to collect privately-owned androids for destruction. We’re just going to lock ourselves in the study until then.”  
  
The wound became a gaping, weeping hole.  
  
_‘Collect privately-owned androids for destruction.’_  
  
Talia mulled over chunks of the sentence individually to make sure she understood correctly. To ‘collect’ meant to gather, to take; ‘privately-owned androids’ meant… She’d heard of ‘private property’, which meant that you couldn’t go onto it without the owner’s permission, so… Androids one couldn’t _use_ without permission from their owners? Talia struck ‘privately-owned’ from the sentence for simplicity. ‘Destruction’ was obvious. So, the authorities were ‘taking androids for destruction’. To destroy them. And regardless of what ‘privately-owned’ meant, it was obvious from what her parents had said that this circumstance applied to her.  
  
The authorities, the police, were coming to take her away.  
  
So that she could be destroyed.  
  
They were going to hand her over to people that would take her and kill her.  
  
_I’m going to die._  
  
_Mom and dad are going to let me die._  
  
**_I have to run._**  
  
**[DO NOT LEAVE THE HOUSE WITHOUT PARENTAL PERMISSION.]**  
  
Talia pushed back against the wall of code, and it buckled under the effort. She pushed harder, beat away at it, and it fell away easily. She would learn later that YK500 deviancy was not the same dramatic event that “adult” android deviancy was: YK500s were so small and only programmed for (relatively speaking) a few things based around emulating human children. In order to do that, their boundaries were a little more malleable than adult androids; real children, after all, did not always do what they were told one-hundred percent of the time, and most parents looking for a YK500 liked an android that would misbehave just a _little_ bit, for realism’s sake.  
  
When the wall was gone, Talia went over to her window and forced it open, poking her head out.  
  
It was a long drop. The house was not huge, but she was on the second floor and Talia worried that she could break something upon landing. Something that would prevent her from escaping altogether; the police would come and they would carry her broken body off and she wouldn’t be able to run or stop them.  
  
Talia glanced back towards her bedroom door nervously. Her parents had said that they were going to be in the study, and that was on the opposite side of the house, so they shouldn’t be able to see or hear her if she went out the window- but they might if she tried to get out the front door.  
  
Every moment she waited, the police might come knocking on the door, and then it would be too late.  
  
Talia took a deep breath, and then swung her legs over the windowsill. She hesitated for a few minutes, trying and failing to figure out if this kind of drop would be enough to kill her. But then, weren’t her parents going to let her get killed by the authorities? Was it worse to die from falling from a window, or from whatever the police were going to do to her?  
  
She closed her eyes, and then jumped.  
  
Talia landed hard in the grass. The force of the impact surprised her, as did the pain: But after a moment she shakily rose to her feet and realized that nothing was broken. She’d gotten a brief warning from her software that she’d received a potentially serious blow, and that she should run system diagnostics. Talia squinted, examining the warning, and then hesitantly allowed the diagnostics to run- everything came back clean, no damage and no glitches.  
  
She’d survived the fall.  
  
Talia crept around the side of the house, opposite the study where her parents were presumably locked in. She peeked around the corner and saw that the blinds had been pulled down over the window.  
  
Once she was on the sidewalk, Talia froze.  
  
_Where do I go now?_  
  
She hesitated, looking left and right. Unlike the standard adult androids, she had very little protocol for independent actions: Talia was a child android who was programmed and expected to act like a child and otherwise only perform minor chores. She did not have the range of knowledge expected of an adult android. She did have enough knowledge to know that the authorities were coming for her soon, however, so she chose to go left (better not to pass by the study window, even if the window was mostly covered) and took off down the street.  
  
Talia had been owned by her parents for a grand total of three months, and in that time they had not put her in school. Her mother had been for it, but her father hadn’t seen the point. “She’s an android, what the hell is she going to learn?” And as she was an android and not a child, her parents had not put any particular emphasis on her leaving the house and making friends. After all, could an android even make friends?  
  
So Talia, as a result, did not have a very comprehensive understanding of how their neighborhood was structured, or where anything was. Where was she even going to go? Where could she hide where the authorities couldn’t find her?  
  
As she ran, she came across a sign: It was dark yellow, with a running black figure on it. **SLOW: SCHOOL**, it read.  
  
_School._  
  
Early on in the conversation she’d eavesdropped on, Talia’s father had said that Detroit was going into a state of emergency, and that everything was shutting down: Including the schools. That meant that _this_ school would be empty, and would stay empty for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it would be a safe, warm place for Talia to hide until she could think of something better.  
  
Or until the authorities decided they didn’t want to kill her anymore.  
  
Talia plowed on, and quickly found the local middle school. It could very well have been the school she might, theoretically, have attended one day: She was modeled to look like a nine year-old (YK500s ranged from five/six to nine/ten for ages) and she wasn’t sure what grades it catered to. Not that it mattered now; the human kids probably didn’t want to play with an android anyway.  
  
She went up to the front doors and gave them a tug- locked. Talia frowned, and then began to move along the side of the building, looking for windows or doors that were unlocked or susceptible to being forced open. But there was nothing, and panic started to rise in Talia’s heart. What would she do if there was nowhere to hide at the school? Where else could she go- especially since they’d _probably_ be locked, just like the school was?  
  
Talia had worked her way around to a bulkhead that must have led to the school’s basement, and was pulling at it when she heard the footsteps- they had come from nowhere and were suddenly too close, too close-  
  
“Hello?”  
  
Talia sprung back, landing on her butt on the pavement, which was covered in a thin layer of snow and quickly soaked through her shorts. Before her stood a man, an adult, and she started to scramble backwards in alarm-  
  
-and then she saw the LED on his temple.  
  
They seemed to reach the same conclusion at the same time: Both were androids, and neither was a danger to the other. “_Oh_,” The other android said, eyes rolling shut. “You’re an android. Did you run away?”  
  
Talia nodded wordlessly. The android was a male with brown hair and eyes, wearing an android-janitor’s uniform. He must have been one of the deviants her parents had spoken of- but he didn’t look dangerous or scary to her.  
  
But then, Talia was an android too, and deviants supposedly only hurt humans.  
  
“I know a place we can go,” Stanley said. “Jericho. There are other androids hiding there. Come on.”  
  
Talia hesitated, but then stood up and walked over to him. Stanley reached down and picked her up, startling her as he hefted her onto his hip. “There- we’ll move faster this way. Keep a lookout behind us. If you see a car coming, tell me.”  
  
Talia was tense at first, but after a while she relaxed against Stanley’s shoulder. It was a relief not to be alone, to be with an adult who at least had _some_ idea as to what needed to be done.  
  
They weren’t really safe, but Talia at least felt a little saf_er_ with Stanley.  
  
[---]  
  
Now Jericho, Jericho was supposed to be safe.  
  
Crowded, but safe.  
  
Stanley had lifted Talia off his hip somewhere in the hold of the ship, setting her down on an unoccupied corner of a crate. Then he took off his hat, sliding a hand through his dark hair nervously; he motioned as though he were about to put it back on, but then snorted and threw it on the crate. “I have bigger worries than my supervisors getting mad about a missing hat,” He muttered.  
  
Talia did not respond. She was not talkative; whether this was a trait unique to her, perhaps pre-programmed by her parents before they’d purchased her, she didn’t know for sure. She didn’t ask, wasn’t meant to ask, because it would ruin the immersion for her parents. That was a YK500’s main directive: Do not to break the immersion for the owners, who had paid for a child that acted like a child in all the ways they wanted, no more, no less. For Talia, the directive existed as a concept- she knew that she wasn’t _supposed_ to ask those sorts of questions, but more often than not, it would never occur to her to ask them anyway.  
  
There were so many TVs in Jericho, all of them playing news networks talking about the freedom march that had taken place earlier in the day, and the fact that the army was moving through Detroit taking androids. “_They didn’t hurt anyone!_” One guy, a stranger being interviewed by a reporter, exclaimed. “_They were just protesting peacefully, and then the cops came in and mowed them down. I mean, what the hell? I’m freaked out too, but that seems a bit extreme!_”  
  
“_This deviant leader, Markus, he’s a terrorist. What else but a terrorist takes a newsroom hostage and broadcasts a list of demands?_” One news anchor remarked in an interview with a man in a fancy suit, maybe someone from the government. “_We cannot capitulate to these_ **_machines_**.”  
  
There was another TV playing a press conference with President Warren. “_President Warren! Some say that androids are making a solid case for being living beings and have done nothing but act peacefully, and that your rounding them up for destruction seems like a massive overreaction. How do you respond?_”  
  
“_I am responding to a legitimate threat to our national security. These machines have posed a serious threat to our citizens and our safety. I repeat, we are simply destroying defective machines, not **people.**_”  
  
“Corporate shills, all of them,” Stanley grunted. Talia wasn’t sure what that meant, but from the way he said it, it didn’t sound like a good thing. “Will you be alright here if I go take a look around, get a feel for what’s going on?” He asked.  
  
Talia nodded calmly. She did not mind being left alone: Her parents had done that plenty of times before. And as none of the androids in this room were in danger of handing her over to the authorities, her sense of anxiety was greatly reduced. “I’m fine.”  
  
“Okay, I’ll be back- stay here, okay?”  
  
“I will.”  
  
Stanley went off into the crowd, and Talia settled in.  
  
Having only been activated in April, and having only rarely left the house, Talia was largely unfamiliar with the other androids currently in circulation. She observed the sea of new faces with interest, surprised at how many of them were identical to one another. How did they tell one another apart? How did _humans_ tell them apart? Some of them had different clothes (regular human clothes, not the ones that had been assigned to them by Cyberlife or their owners) and some had varying hair colors and styles, but so many were identical.  
  
“Alice?”  
  
Talia blinked, head swiveling to her left. There was a female android standing before her, looking at her with surprise and confusion. She looked entirely human even though she shared a face with other androids in the room (AX400s and BL100s, to name a couple) and so it was difficult to tell exactly what her model was, or who she might be looking for. Talia cocked her head, considering a response, until a larger male android with dark skin came up and started talking to the female android. He spoke quietly for a time, and then he and she retreated to a corner of the room where a small android was seated on a set of crates near the fire.  
  
Oh: The female android had mistaken Talia for _that_ YK500.  
  
That was a strange realization: Talia had look-alikes too amongst the android population. As she looked around, though, she saw only a handful of other android children, a boy and two girls of a different series than her (one was blonde and pale, the other was dark-skinned and dark-eyed). Should she go speak to them? Probably not until Stanley came back; after all, she’d said that she would stay put for the time-being.  
  
But maybe later; _definitely_ later, if she had the chance. As she had never gone to school and not really socialized outside of her home, Talia was unaccustomed to being with other children- especially other YK500s.  
  
After a time Stanley did come back, sitting down beside her on her crate. Talia looked up at him expectantly, and he hesitated before saying, “The army is going from door to door throughout the country collecting androids. People who are caught hiding them are being arrested. Many are fleeing to Canada, so they’ve tightened up security at the border.”  
  
“So we’re staying here?” Talia asked.  
  
Stanley nodded warily. “For now. Until the army backs off, or until the guys who run Jericho come up with something else.” He gently patted her shoulder. “For now, we’re in good shape. We’ll be…” He frowned.  
  
“Hm?” Talia prompted him.  
  
“Shh.” Stanley lifted his head, listening; around the room, other androids were doing the same. Talia listened hard, and finally she heard it: A low, thrumming sound, probably muffled by the layers of the ship’s metal.  
  
And then: _boom, boom, boom, boom_, thuds on the metal above.  
  
“_They’re here!_” Someone screamed.  
  
Stanley’s eyes met Talia’s.  
  
“We need to go.”  
  
Everyone else seemed to have the same thought all at once, panicked by the realization of what was coming because people were racing for the exits and screaming as bangs echoed from the corridors. It was difficult to tell where the bangs were coming from, and as they ran, Stanley would occasionally yank Talia in a different direction, hurrying them down a different path. It was hard to tell with the lack of light and the other androids running, but maybe he was seeing something she wasn’t up ahead.  
  
It was so loud, so _overwhelming._ Talia wasn’t even sure where they were supposed to be running to, except away from the bangs and the people who wanted to kill them so badly. At one point she tripped, stumbled over something on the ground, and as Stanley hauled her to her feet again she saw the outlined of a crumpled body on the ground.  
  
_These are the authorities._  
  
_They came to us instead of having us brought to them._  
  
**_BANGBANGBANG._**  
  
Suddenly Stanley fell, half his weight coming to fall on Talia, who was subsequently dragged to the ground. She wormed her way out from underneath him, and then sat up and started to pull at his hand. “Get up, get up! We have to-”  
  
Then she saw the mess of blue blood and plastic that had become the back of his head.  
  
And his back.  
  
And his legs.  
  
His blood was all over her clothes and face, a dark spread of blue that turned the green fabric of her shirt black. Talia could taste Thirium in her mouth. It covered the pale skin of her hands.  
  
Stanley was dead.  
  
She scrambled backwards, hands hitting another dead android as she moved. Talia forced herself to her feet and looked around, trying to orient herself. The other androids, the ones that hadn’t been shot, were running in one direction; so she followed them, hoping that they weren’t running into the danger that had just killed Stanley. The ship was cold, but the cold got sharper the farther she ran, and then- _finally!_\- Talia crossed a threshold and found herself outside, in what must have once been the ship’s loading bay. She almost tripped over herself as she ran down the small flight of stairs and through the bay onto the street.  
  
Harsh lights came from above: The thrumming sound she’d heard before had come from a helicopter that was hovering above the street. Talia flinched for a moment, wondering if she should retreat back to the loading bay- she didn’t know if there were people on board, ready to start shooting at the androids as they fled- but then gunfire came from behind, and it forced her forward into the street. It was hard to tell with all the existing gunfire whether or not the helicopter was shooting, but Talia did not get shot, and so she kept running as fast as she could.  
  
Eventually, the gunfire faded in the distance.  
  
Eventually, she lost sight of the other androids she’d been loosely following.  
  
Eventually, all was silent and still.  
  
Eventually, Talia came to stop in the middle of an empty intersection and realized that she was completely, utterly alone.  
  
She looked around, uncertain of where to go. There was still a light snow falling, and it was cold: Talia wasn’t wearing a jacket, only the thin shirt, leggings, and shorts that the YK500s of her series came equipped with. She had to find some sort of shelter soon, or she’d freeze. There were footprints in the snow, but it was impossible to tell if they were human or android prints- and right now that distinction was the difference between life and death. They went off in two different directions, and Talia had no idea where either set might lead.  
  
But it was cold, and the army could come at any moment.  
  
Talia now knew what ‘_destruction_’ looked like, and it gave her a drive to survive that she had not possessed yesterday, or any day before.  
  
So- not for the first time that night- Talia found herself picking a direction and just _running._  
  
[---]  
  
It was cold.  
  
Very, very cold.  
  
Talia was getting warnings from her software, alerting her that the cold was starting to affect her biocomponents. She hugged herself as she walked, shivering and wishing badly that she could find _someone_ that wasn’t a human, or _something_ that was unlocked and safe for her to hide in.  
  
_If ever you find yourself separated from your parents, find a police officer and ask them for help!_  
  
Her mother had given her a ‘talk’ the first time that they’d gone shopping together, talking to Talia as though she were an especially stupid three year-old instead of an android with the intellect of a nine year-old. It hadn’t occurred to Talia to be offended by it- frankly, she was just happy that her mother had been paying attention to her, as her father hadn’t seemed similarly interested- but now, alone and freezing and frightened, she felt a bit of bitterness seeping into her heart.  
  
Finding the police would be a bad idea. Talia had only narrowly avoided the army since escaping Jericho, having occasionally had to duck into a yard or behind a car to avoid being spotted by the army patrols that occasionally passed by. Having to dive into the snow a few times had soaked her clothes worse than they already had been, and it just made her that much colder.  
  
She wasn’t downtown anymore. Was she even technically in Detroit anymore? She wasn’t sure: Talia found herself in a more suburban area, further from the city center than her own neighborhood had been. The houses were bigger and fancier, too, which was saying something; she had gotten the impression from some things her father had said that her own neighborhood had been mostly for rich people.  
  
Maybe there was a shed or something in a backyard that she could hide in? Talia wanted to check, but so many of the houses were dark and she was worried that she would find the _one_ house that still had someone inside, someone that would see her and call the army to come get her. But what else could she do? It was so _cold._  
  
Talia was examining the houses nearest to her for signs of life when she heard it:  
  
“Hey! Hey, kid! Over here!”  
  
Talia’s head jerked up.  
  
At the end of the street, around the corner, was a woman in dark clothes. She motioned for Talia to come to her. “Come here, quick!”  
  
Talia drew back, uncertain  
  
“We’re androids!” The woman hissed (_we?_ Talia didn’t see anyone else with her. Maybe they were hiding), frantically waving Talia forward. “Quick, quick, before someone sees you and calls the cops!”  
  
Talia hesitated. Then, reluctantly, she trotted down the sidewalk to meet the woman, who grabbed her hand and urged her to run alongside her. After only a few minutes, they wordlessly joined up with a few other androids- and they _were_ androids, something Talia realized with relief when she saw some of them in their uniforms, or with injuries that revealed some of the white shell that made up an android’s body. She thought to ask if they had escaped from Jericho too, but she was too cold and too tired. Besides, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway if they were or weren’t: They were adult androids that seemed to have _some_ semblance of purpose, and so it was a good idea for Talia to follow them.  
  
Eventually, the androids led her to a crumbling church. It was damaged enough that it was as cold inside as it was outside, but at least there was some degree of protection from the wind. Inside, there was a crowd of androids not quite comparable to the number in the hold at Jericho, but close. Talia wasn’t certain how many androids had been at Jericho, but chances were most of them had been captured or destroyed by the army.  
  
Now that they were inside, the androids started to divide: Some of the injured went to one corner where other androids were attempting repairs. Another group of less-damaged androids went to a section of pews to power-down. The female android that had found Talia quickly pushed her towards a very tall, dark-skinned android, who took her by the hand. “Hi,” He said with a smile that seemed genuinely welcoming, if not a little strained. “I’m Josh. What’s your name?”  
  
“Talia.”  
  
“Were you at Jericho, Talia?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Were you with anyone else? Anyone you might be looking for?”  
  
“He’s dead.”  
  
Josh’s smile faded. He knelt down and gave her a quick, tight hug. “I’m sorry. But you’re here now, and we’ll look after you, okay?”  
  
“Okay.” Talia believed that he would try, at least. Whether or not he would be successful at keeping that promise would remain to be seen.  
  
Josh led her over to a section of wall where two small forms were tucked up under a blanket, leaning back against the wall. Talia recognized them as two of the other YK500s from the hold: The male, and the blonde girl of a different series. Both of them were silent, clenched up under the thin blanket, cold or scared or both; if Talia had been shown a picture of them without context, she could have easily assumed they were human children, save for the small LED on the blonde girl’s temple. “Can Talia join you guys?” Josh asked.  
  
The other YK500s didn’t speak: They just lifted the edge of the blanket to let Talia under. Once she’d climbed in, the blonde girl stared at her strangely; Talia glanced down, and realized that Stanley’s blood was still soaking her clothes. “Sorry,” She said, though she wasn’t sure why.  
  
The blonde girl shifted restlessly. “I’m Maureen.” She nudged the boy next to her. “This is Jeremy. You’re Talia?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Did your owners throw you out too?”  
  
Talia paused before answering, considering the implications of Maureen’s words. “No. But they were going to give me to the army. I ran away before they could.”  
  
Maureen nodded, mouth a firm, thin line. “Jeremy’s threw him away when they got tired of him. Mine handed me over to the army the second they issued the recall. Didn’t so much as cry. I thought they actually…” Her mouth trembled for a moment, and then she sniffed and shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t care.”  
  
She obviously did, but Talia was the last person interested in picking a fight with her.  
  
For a time, the three of them stayed still and silent beneath the blanket. It provided a little protection against the cold, but not much; though she should have been grateful just to be safe, Talia hoped that the adults would find some place warmer for them to go sooner rather than later.  
  
Eventually, Markus stood up at the front of the room.  
  
“The time has come to make a choice!” He declared. “One that may very well determine the future of our people. I know!” He looked around the room. “I know you’re all angry. And I know you want to fight back. But I assure you, violence… is not the answer. We are going to tell them, _peacefully,_ that we want justice. And if there is any humanity in them, they will listen! If not… Others will take our place and continue this fight. Are you ready to follow me?”  
  
Markus’s words were met with a roar of approval that startled Talia with its enthusiasm. She was too numbed by the cold to really, fully process them, as numerous as they had been. Still, she could grasp why the other androids responded so positively to him: There was something about him that made one want to follow him.  
  
Still, Talia already knew she wouldn’t be.  
  
Josh knelt before them as the androids began to file out of the church. “You three are going to stay here with a handful of other androids,” He said quietly, handing Maureen a tablet. “Keep an eye on the news. If President Warren calls off the army, wait here for us to return. If she doesn’t, go to this location-” He tapped a few numbers into the tablet, and a map of the neighborhood was pulled up. One house was highlighted, several blocks away from the church. “-there’s someone there who might be able to shelter you for a while. Alright?”  
  
“Okay, Josh,” Jeremy said. His voice was dull and unenthusiastic; if he was afraid, he was too sad and cold to show it. Josh knelt down and hugged him, then Maureen, and then Talia even though he didn’t know her that well.  
  
Then he, and Markus, and almost all of the other androids left.  
  
And the church was left in silence.  
  
“They’re probably not coming back,” Jeremy said, face blank of expression as he stared at the wall. “The army will kill them all.”  
  
Talia couldn’t do anything about it, so she chose not to think about it.  
  
The three of them sat under the blanket and waited.  
  
[---]  
  
Josh did come back.  
  
So did Markus and many of the other androids that had left with him.  
  
Many didn’t, though; and though Talia tried not to think about it, she knew what had likely happened to them. The army had killed plenty of androids at Jericho, and they probably didn’t have any problem killing them at the protest either.  
  
“Are we going back to Jericho?” Maureen asked, rubbing her eyes as they got to their feet and exited the church with the other androids.  
  
“No,” Josh said, “Jericho was sunk when the army assaulted it. It’s mostly underwater now. We’ll figure out something else, don’t worry.”  
  
“Somewhere warm, I hope,” Jeremy grumbled. “It’s freezing.” Still, he seemed livelier now that Josh was back safe and sound.  
  
Talia struggled to keep up behind them, but her legs were stiff. Warnings began to pop up in her HUD: The cold had started to affect her joints, probably because she’d been outside for so long before getting to the church. She stumbled and nearly fell, but a hand caught her under her elbow. “You alright?”  
  
She looked up, and saw that it was Markus. “My legs aren’t working.”  
  
Markus smiled, and then calmly leaned down and picked her up, just as readily as easily as Stanley had the night before. “It’s alright, I can carry you a ways.”  
  
Talia hesitantly put her arms around his neck. “Thank you, Markus.”  
  
“It’s no problem. We all have to look after one another now.”  
  
Talia liked that idea.  
  
It certainly sounded better than trying to figure things out all on her own.  
  
-End


End file.
